Contact Information

Academic Background

BA (1995) University of British Columbia

MPhil (2000) and PhD (2005) University of Cambridge

Biography

My current research addresses the politics of nature and environmentalism in the Odessa region of Southern Ukraine. Since 2009, I have been carrying out SSHRC-funded research in the Danube Delta town of Vilkovo on residents’ and nonresidents’ changing relationships with silt, water, fish, reeds, and birds in the context of the creation of a transboundary biosphere reserve and a rapidly transforming political economy. A second project examines the changing strategies of environmental activists in the Tatarbunary District in their struggles to dismantle a failed Soviet-era Irrigation project and restore Lake Sasyk as a saltwater estuary. I am also working with Gisa Weszkalnys to develop an anthropological approach to the study of natural resources that links an ethnographic approach with insights from posthumanist theory on the distributed nature of materiality. www.engagingresources.org. Previously I conducted research on urban place-making practices, memory, and cosmopolitanism in the Black Sea port of Odessa.

Publications

Forthcoming. The Politics of Multiplication in a Failed Soviet Irrigation Project, Or, How Sasyk Has Been Kept from the Sea, Ethnos.

2015 Conflict and Conservation in Ukraine's Danube Delta: On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance, Development and Change 46(3).

2015. (In)Accessible Land: The Changing Practices and Regulation of
Gardening in the Reedbeds of Ukraine’s Danube Delta, in The Biopolitics
of the Danube Delta: Nature, History, Policies. Eds. Kristof van Assche
and Constantin Iordachi. Lexington Books.

2014 Odessa's Two Big Differences (and few small ones). Life after the Maidan and May 2. September 1. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-09-01-richardson-en.html

2008. Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine. University of Toronto Press: Toronto.

2006. Living Cosmopolitanism? Tolerance, Religion and Local Identity in Odessa, in The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe. pp. 213-240. ed. Chris Hann. Lit: Berlin.

2005. The Place(s) of Moldovanka in the Making of Odessa, The Anthropology of East Europe Review. Fall: 72-89.